Norbert Michel
Norbert Michel and Jerome Famularo

The Trump administration’s trade policy has taken a serious beating during the past few weeks, with good reason. Okay, for many good reasons, some of which we’ll expand on in this post.
But what’s encouraging is that more and more polls suggest Americans understand these trade policies are harmful. And one explanation could be that most Americans recognize that service jobs are good.
In other words, even though the Trump administration seems bent on “bringing back” manufacturing jobs to the United States, most Americans recognize that service sector jobs have already made America great.
You’d never guess it from all the political rhetoric, but service sector jobs have always been a major factor in America’s success.
As I explain in my new book, Crushing Capitalism, service jobs have accounted for a larger share of the US labor force than heavy industry since 1840, and a larger share than agriculture since the early 1900s. Similarly, the service sector’s share of total output exceeded heavy industry’s share during most of US history, with the only exception being a brief period around 1890.
Advocates of recent populist policies like to focus on the supposed demise of manufacturing that occurred after the 1970s, but that focus is misleading. Aside from the perpetual importance of the service sector, reliance on manufacturing jobs steadily declined long before the 1970s.
As Figure 1 shows, manufacturing jobs declined as a share of total employment since 1943, while the share of service jobs steadily increased, and the total number of jobs rose roughly five-fold (from about 30 million to almost 160 million). If the decline in manufacturing was so bad for so many Americans, they would not have experienced strong income growth. But they did, as has been documented by many researchers, despite the political spin.  » Read More
https://www.cato.org/blog/trying-bring-back-manufacturing-jobs-fools-errand